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Video: Fields of Thought

...To date, no natural history collection has an entire galaxy inside of its collection cabinets. However, for astrophysicists to model the universe, meteorite collections can deliver useful snapshots of the history of our own galaxy.

A primary aim of today's natural history collections is to offer such glimpses of the past. Those glimpses show us not only what the world was like in the past, but also how researchers in the past looked at the world. It can be hard to know how to bring together all of those scales of space, time, and perspective, but variation itself is a common thread for natural history collections and the collaborators working across them.